Wednesday, September 16, 2015

You got to hand it to the folks at Taiwan’s EVA Airlines
they’re taking the hypoxia threat seriously. Each of its pilot cadets learning
to fly airliners at the University of North Dakota’s Mesa, Arizona flight training center will take a ride in a hypobaric chamber before leaving the USA to
go back to Taipei and fly the airline’s big jets.

Nearly a decade ago, air
safety officials in Greece suggested that that all airline pilots undergo
hypoxia training, following the loss of a Boeing 737 on a flight from
Cyprus to Athens that killed 121 people on August 14, 2005.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Who is an air crash investigator? On those television
documentaries, there’s always some government sleuth who cracks the case with
extraordinary tenaciousness and a lot of taxpayer money to spend on labs, test
flights and reconstructions.

The ever-popular NBC News commentator and Greg
Feith usually makes an appearance, which gives me a chance to remind my readers
that his nickname is “the Mud Stud” picked up during the ValueJet crash of
1996.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

United's boss Jeff Smisek resigned from the airline today, as a probe continues into whether he and other top executives agreed to provide favors for a government official in New Jersey.

In a statement, United says it has been cooperating with a federal investigation and in fact, that the airline had conducted its own probe into whether David Samson of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey demanded the airline reopen a route to Columbia, South Carolina in exchange for the go-ahead on several airport projects at Newark Liberty International Airport.